Album Notes

The scene opens like this. Open mic night. Seventeen. Alone. The only girl on the list. The only girl in the room. Julie Loyd stands on stage wailing away on a cheap guitar- wearing another hole in the finish, weaving a tune with a set of gutsy vocals and stomping out a rhythm with a set of steel-toed combat boots. Two songs later, Julie steps off stage and puts her guitar back in its case. A fellow musician walks up to her and says, simply, "give up everything before you give up this." When Julie recalls her favorite audience reactions, this easily tops her list. Originally a dancer and child of musical theater, Julie Loyd's music comes across best on stage. In the five years since that open mic, Julie has expanded her horizons playing all around the country and sharing stages with such performers as Shawn Mullins, Michelle Malone, Ellis, and Edie Carey, to name a few. Though she's left behind the Broadway vibrato, she uses her movement experience to step inside her songs, contorting, kicking, and undulating to the beat of her own percussive guitar playing. She has a knack for making folk dynamic: "I'm tired of folk being seen as boring. Just because I'm playing an acoustic guitar doesn't mean I'm going to be singing about the mountains-and if I am, I'm singing loud." Born and raised alongside the Blue Ridge Mountains in Charlottesville, Virginia, Julie has been struggling with her southern roots and her Yankee mentality since she was a kid. She was seventeen when she finally decided to head towards the Big Apple, leaving her small town behind her. In New York, she became a student at New York University studying gender, sexuality, and performance-a major that could only lead her to the life of a folk musician, singing about lesbian relationships in a way that universalizes even those lifestyles considered to be "alternative." Julie decided to leave the city after the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 and retrace her southern roots. She found herself in Asheville, NC, at the southern edge of the Appalachians-the same mountain range she grew up with. Within a few months, Julie was making a living touring full-time around the Southeast. After playing her first national tour last summer, Julie Loyd returned to New York City to work on her third studio album. Julie has teamed up with David Perlick Molinari, a producer who has worked extensively with MTV and Cinemax, for a project that fuses confessional acoustic folk-rock with innovative pop production. After three years of waiting, fans can expect Julie's intensity to come across more than ever on the new album, aptly titled "The Waiting Room."